I totally agree with your sentiment. However, I also think that the popularity of Jupyter is largely due to the fact that it does appeal to a certain type of us

I totally agree with your sentiment. However, I also think that the popularity of Jupyter is largely due to the fact that it does appeal to a certain type of user. I do believe that we have room for more than one option. The work that we've done in interactive programming in the Python VS Code extension is one possible approach that folks have seemed to like, and that aligns with what you're saying. We're going to continue to explore that direction in addition to the Jupyter work that we're doing. Stay tuned!